Chapter VIII: The Craft of Adventure

Designing is a craft as much as an art. Standards of workmanship,
of “finish”, are valued and appreciated by players, and
the craft of the adventure game has developed as it has been handed
down. The embryonic ‘Zork’ (Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce
Daniels, Dave Lebling, 1977) – shambolic, improvised, frequently
unfair – was thrown together in a fortnight of spare time.
‘Trinity’ (Brian Moriarty, 1986), plotted in synopsis
in 1984, required thirteen months to design and test.

‘Spellbreaker’ (Dave Lebling, 1985)
is a case in point. A first-rate game, it advanced the state of the
art by allowing the player to name items. It brought a trilogy to
a satisfying conclusion, while standing on its own merits. A dense
game, with more content per location than ever before, it had a
structure which succeeded both in being inexplicable at first yet
inevitable later. With sly references to string theory and to Aristophanes'
The Frogs, it was cleverer than it looked. But it was also difficult
and, at first, bewildering, with the rewards some way off. What kept
players at it were the “cyclopean blocks of stone”, the
“voice of honey and ashes”, the characters who would
unexpectedly say things like “You insult me, you insult even my
dog!”. Polished, spare text is almost always more effective
than a discursive ramble, and many of the room descriptions in
‘Spellbreaker’ are nicely judged:

Packed Earth
This is a small room crudely constructed of packed earth, mud, and
sod. Crudely framed openings of wood tied with leather thongs lead
off in each of the four cardinal directions, and a muddy hole leads
down.

In short, it was masterly craftsmanship (in what was
Lebling's seventh title) which made this exercise in pushing the boundaries
of difficulty and connectedness possible.

Classics like ‘Spellbreaker’ cast long
shadows and have endured beyond all expectation: ‘Zork II’,
for instance, has been continuously on sale in the high street since
1981, a record matched by only about two dozen of that year's novels.
But the story of interactive fiction is not the story of the production
company Infocom, Inc., alone. Many hundreds of plays were performed
in late sixteenth-century London, but today only Shakespeare's three
dozen are familiar, even the weakest protected from neglect by the
gilding of being canonical. The resulting attention may be justified
on literary grounds, but perhaps not historical, since it gives a
picture wholly unlike the regular diet
of the contemporary audience.
So with Infocom. Many 1980s adventure players seldom if ever played
their works, or not until years later. Their real importance, besides
quality and familiarity, is that they were foundational, in the same
way that Hergé's pre-war Tintin albums evolved the visual
grammar of the European graphic novel, from layout rules for speech
bubbles and panels to how sudden motion should be depicted. Tintin
and his dog Snowy began to walk from left to right (the direction of
reading) when making progress, but from right to left after a setback.
Snowy lost first the ability to speak, then the ability to understand
Tintin's speech. Infocom had a similar effect in laying down the
mechanics of interactive fiction, the conventions of which are subliminally
accepted by players (and silently perpetuated by Inform). For instance,
it was the Infocom games of 1986 which began the now familiar use
of pop-up literary quotations as a stylish form of commentary or
signposting, a development which might be compared to exclamation
marks appearing over the heads of surprised characters in Tintin.

The mechanics of reading a novel are almost unconscious,
but the mechanics of interactive fiction are far less familiar,
and it is a uniquely unforgiving medium. A technical mistake by a
novelist, say an alternating dialogue so long that it becomes unclear
who is speaking, does not make it impossible for the reader to continue,
as if the last hundred pages of the book had been glued together. The
designer of an interactive fiction has continually to worry over the
order in which things happen, the level of difficulty, the rate at
which new material is fed out and so on. Meanwhile, even the designer's
footing seems uncertain, for the form itself is a wavering compromise.
An interactive fiction is not a child's puzzle-book, with a maze on
one page and a rebus on the next, but nor is it a novel. Neither pure
interaction nor pure fiction, it lies in a strange and still largely
unexplored land in between.

•REFERENCES
In this chapter, a game is cited by designer and date when first mentioned
but subsequently by title alone. Details of availability may be found
in the bibliography of cited works.
•Unattributed quotations from
Infocom designers are all to be found in the ftp.gmd.de
archive of 1980s computing press articles. My choice has been skewed
by availability: Lebling is quoted frequently not because he was a
great designer (though he was) but because he often went on the record.
Marc Blank, among other notable figures, spent less time entertaining
the press.
•Some thousands of internal Infocom
email messages (1982–) have been quietly preserved. Except
at the end the overall impression is of a sensible workplace with
engagingly warm moments, and a number of unsung figures emerge from the
shadows. Much of this material is unlikely to become public because
of its personal nature. To respect this, I have quoted nothing directly
from unpublished email and have avoided attributing specific
opinions to named people. I do quote from the handful of relatively innocuous
emails published on Activision's Masterpieces of Infocom compact
disc, though note that these were stripped of all context. For instance
the most interesting, a 1987 memo about which way to take text games
now (discussed briefly in §49 below),
is not as it seems a minute of a committee but was typed up as an
apology to two people offended at being excluded from a low-key crisis
meeting, held covertly off the premises.
•A happier example is a sketch
written by Stu Galley in response to an email circular asking for a job
description: the so-called ‘Implementors' Creed’.
Despite the style – fifty percent mission statement, fifty
percent Martin Luther King – this manifesto is worth reading,
because it is conscious of working in an experimental and artistic
medium: “I am exploring a new medium for telling stories. My
readers should become immersed in the story and forget where they are.
They should forget about the keyboard and the screen, forget everything
but the experience. My goal is to make the computer invisible. …
None of my goals is easy. But all are worth hard work. Let no one doubt
my dedication to my art.”
•Another true believer was Cleveland
M. Blakemore, in his treatise in issue 54 of Ahoy! magazine:
“Every human being on earth is a natural dynamo of creative
energy. Learning how to tap this energy and translate it to a book,
a canvas, or a computer's memory, is a skill that can be learned.”